


The Eighth Delphic Maxim

by Tiberius_Tibia



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Buck Barnes Is Gonna Fuck Someone Up, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Human Experimentation, I'm Being So Mean to Steve, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Implied/Referenced Torture, Internalized Homophobia, Kidnapping, Lobotomy, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Past Torture, Protective Bucky Barnes, Psychological Torture, Redemption, Steve Rogers Angst, Steve Rogers Feels, The Avengers Are Gonna Fuck Someone Up, Torture, shit is gonna go down
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-13
Updated: 2014-12-12
Packaged: 2018-02-08 16:25:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 17,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1948044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tiberius_Tibia/pseuds/Tiberius_Tibia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Capkinkmeme prompt:<br/>What if Bucky had already broken his programming and remembered (most) of who he was? Maybe HYDRA wasn't as good as they thought they were, or maybe Bucky had started leaving himself notes Memento-style every time he started to remember something, and finally by 2014 he knows who he is and what's been done to him. But of course, he can't just run. Its not that easy to get away from HYDRA. So he bides his time, pretends to still be the Winter Soldier until he has the opportunity to escape for good.</p><p>Only before that time comes, HYDRA captures Steve (and Co.?) and Bucky will do anything to get Steve out safe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue- The Ubiquity of Nepotism and How It Benefits Sgt. Barnes

An organization being thoroughly evil doesn't necessarily make it efficient. Bucky figures that out in some indeterminate year, one he's fairly sure came sometime after he shot a moving target in a bright, sprawling city. But he never learns exactly when or why. By the time he's aware of the thought it's already too late, because that's a thought the Asset would never have. 

The when is late winter 1964. The why is Dr. Hector Falstaff. Falstaff has a degree in neuroscience from the University of Zurich. He got the degree the same way he got the job with HYDRA- generations of the right people knowing the right people. Falstaff is passable at football and quite a good horseman, decorates his HYDRA office tastefully; he even has a small Caravaggio and a wine cooler stocked with Chậteau Lafite. He is not a bumbler nor a fool, not even entirely incompetent. He is just incompetent enough to be damaging and vain enough to ignore the fact. Dr. Falstaff leads a team dedicated to improving the Asset's programming through selective memory targeting using electro-chemical stimulus. After firing three-quarters of his team within four months- too many questions about his theories, too many minor corrections to his calculations- he is the smartest man in the room.

Bucky knows none of this. The Soldier could have told them- tried to tell them- that the chair still hurt, hurt worse than ever, but no longer filled his brain with static. His motor control immediately after a session was too weak to form the words even if he'd known what was wrong. They thrust him into cryo before he has the chance to tell him that he still knows the name of the target as well as the name of the city from his last mission.

Instead he sleeps and wakes, and sleeps and wakes, and all the while those waking intervals stack on top of each other and is this how the handlers feel all the time? Like they're balancing on top of a rickety tower of blocks that grows ever more unsteady with each added brick? For a while he wants to tell someone, wants them to get him back on solid ground with nothing before. But the handlers have long since stopped gauging his reactions, long since stopped listening to him. 

He starts making a tiny scratch with the metal fingers of his left hand inside the cryo chamber each time they put him under. Cryosleep has always been more gradual than perhaps they realize; the blood takes time to slow, the body’s core temperature takes time to drop before the Asset loses consciousness. Bucky talks himself to sleep after making his secret tally and the words he whispers in his head are comforting even if there’s a wrongness to them. The next time he wakes up its with the sudden knowledge that he was telling himself a story he once told to a group of laughing men around a wood stove in a burned-out farmhouse- only now he’d been telling that story of an Autumn day in Brooklyn in Russian. After that he begins teaching himself to think in English again.


	2. High Stakes 101 with the Good Sister Helene of St. John the Divine

His fingers twitch involuntarily. The Winter Soldier would never make a sound during these recalibrations so Bucky can’t either. He keeps his eyes open but lets their focus slide. The beige, concrete walls are institutional enough that its easy to pretend he’s back in a Brooklyn orphanage- he’s getting an inoculation, that’s the pain in his arm and he doesn’t want to cry in front of the other boys. 

Bucky concentrates on remembering their faces; Ricky with his awful jug ears, Ben with the scars on his hands from holding onto lighted matches a bit too long, Frankie- who all the girls thought was the handsomest boy on the block, and Steve. He suspects he might be making up the details about the rest of them, but even if he is- so what? Maybe Ricky was the good lookin’ one and Frankie was the firebug, maybe those weren’t their names at all. Even if they weren’t his memories, they were still his thoughts. No one had drilled them into his head, he’d dreamt them up on his own. 

But he’s certain of Steve, of every single thing about him. Steve Rogers had been his best friend, he liked drawing and pears and he’d been the only one Bucky knew who didn’t like King Kong. He said it wasn’t fair for those men to take Kong away from his home just to make themselves rich, only to let the poor bastard get pumped fulla’ lead by the airplanes. Steve Rogers once had to get his tonsils out and woke up bright tomato red all around his nose and mouth from the ether. He had the cleverest hands, the bravest heart and the biggest mouth of anyone Bucky had ever met and-

He has to stop thinking. Telling himself about James Barnes is Bucky’s saving grace these days, but he can’t let himself think of Steve for too long. Count of ten- that’s all he allows himself, ten long slow breaths of picturing Steve Rogers. Because his poker face is good (better than Steve’s was that’s for damn sure) but more than ten breaths worth of Steve and he’d never stop thinking about the dumb punk. Sometimes he’s possessed by an almost overwhelming urge to turn to the nearest guard or doctor and ask them if they’d ever met anyone as stupidly wonderful as Steve. So he counts to ten, and mentally deals himself a hand of five-card stud, just like Sister Helene had taught him, keeping the cards close to his chest. 

She’d taught them all secretly how to play, and he had been her best pupil. Sister Helene had been different from the other nuns; not young, but still soft towards her charges even when they were a pain in her keister. Bucky thinks he heard once that she’d had a little boy of her own, but had to give him up on account of her not having a husband and being sent to the sisters by her folks. Or again, he could be making that up; adding color and texture to the parts of his life that they’d whitewashed over. Thinking of her and their furtive games on the back steps of the orphanage perfects the blank, thousand-yard stare he gives the handlers and lets him enjoy an indian summer evening in Brooklyn. 

The engineer twists his metal arm in a way no human arm is meant to bend. It doesn’t occur to them that the arm itself doesn’t have pain receptors but its welded to his spinal column which is still very much alive with nerve endings. Bucky bites his tongue and deals himself two new cards. He can walk away with the pot if he plays this right.


	3. Interpretations of the Old Testament According to Steve G. Rogers

Religion is the opiate of the masses. It was a lesson they taught the Winter Soldier well, back in the days when Sergeant Barnes used to pray for a miracle. Bucky doesn’t need religion anymore, he doesn’t even need god. What he does need is an Act of God.

Or rather, another Act of God. He still curses himself for muffing the last one. It was like that old joke they used to tell, one of the ones the dockworkers didn’t look slightly ashamed for repeating in front of he and Steve when they’d been kids: A Pollack needs money real bad. Every Sunday he prays “God, let me win the sweepstakes. I swear I’ll just pay off my debts and then I’ll give the rest of the money to the Church.” Finally after a year of Sundays God answers his prayer, “Alright, alright- but you gotta start buying a ticket ya’ mook!” He’d been given his out and he just hadn’t had the sense to take it.

At the time it hadn’t looked like an out, at the time it had looked like one of the circles of hell. He’d spent most of his time then trying to get his past to stop feeling like a badly spliced film that he noted very little of what went on around him. He knew he was traveling south through China, he knew that it was summer. It had happened before dawn, everyone was asleep. Even he had been asleep. The earth had reared and plunged around him. Everything was dust and madness and screaming. After the ground had stopped bucking like a tilt-a-whirl, in the hours he spent trapped under the rubble of the safe house before he was healed enough to free himself, Bucky had dreamed of Sodom and Gomorrah. 

It was a dream he used to have often. Before he’d pressed his naked, gangly adolescent body against Steve’s the dream would come and guilt would eat away at him. After the skinny little punk had taken Bucky’s face between his hands and kissed him, snaked one hand down the front of Bucky’s pants, mingled their sweat and come until they were both as sticky as newborn calves, then the dream came so often that the lack of sleep had nearly maddened him. Steve had finally gotten him to confess it one night after Bucky had opened him up with his rough hands and fucked him so hard he came cross-eyed. The bruises he’d left on Steve had started to form even before they’d fallen asleep. Steve had slept peacefully but Bucky’s mind had filled with jeering voices demanding that Lot bring forth the angels he was sheltering for them to fuck. The angels looked like Steve, and the cruel, taunting voices always sounded like his own. Then the rocks were raining down on the city, crushing the evil voices but crushing Steve too for being caught in that tainted place. 

In the morning he couldn’t hide his red-rimmed eyes from Steve. His friend had listened as Bucky’d mumbled the dream to their ratty bedsheets, then swatted him upside the head. “You missed the whole point. The guys in the story don’t know the angels, they don’t even know they are angels. They’re just a bunch of mean ole’ bastards who want to hurt someone. The rest of the story is about how they’re just as happy to do it to Lot’s daughters as they would be to the angels. Come on Buck, you know that’s not what its like between us.” Bucky had opened his mouth to protest that he was ok doing it to girls too but Steve interrupted him. “Its not about hurting. You’re not about hurting- not me, not the dames you go with. Not ever.”

He’d lain there in the wreckage of Tangshan and dreamed of the Cities of the Plain, of fire and rock being spat down on him and a faint, distant figure who told him that he wasn’t about causing pain. It was the first time he had remembered being Steve’s lover. Sixteen hours later the aftershocks shifted the rubble enough that he could squirm his way free. He’d wandered aimlessly through the broken city for another day and night. He stayed away from the relief crews that began to stream in, but eventually a truck marked medical aide slowed beside him and he recognized the driver as one of his extraction team.

“Thank fuck,” the man had hissed, pulling Bucky into the truck, “We thought you were dead.”


	4. Miseducation of the Black Widow with Bruce Willis and Big Band Music

Lightening hasn’t struck twice for Bucky Barnes. Each time he wakes, every mission they send him on he searches for a cloud of chaos he could use to disappear. If the Winter Soldier was one among thousands, or even merely hundreds, of casualties they might eventually stop looking for him. Anything less than that and well- he knows them far too intimately to imagine them giving up easily. But the right kind of chaos never comes. He thinks more and more often that he'll never get out, that the bravest thing to do would be to put a bullet through his own skull before they wise up, before he's forced to kill any more people. But he hates the idea- fucking despises it- of letting HYDRA take anything else away from him. And anyway, the next time he's awake he finds something else to fight for.

She was just a child, the first child he’d ever spent any time with as an adult, and he was doing his awkward best to protect her. They didn’t call it protection and if they suspected that’s how he saw it she would be sent away for someone else to distort. They were in New York. It hurt like hell to be back and yet not back, but being there with Natalia was easier than being there alone. They were there to improve her English and strengthen her ability to masquerade as an American. HYDRA's heads in the KGB called him the American sometimes, pleased with his accent and his syntax. He finds that highly amusing although he has to brush up on his slang almost constantly or risk slipping something embarrassingly dated into his speech. But he is still the best one to teach a young Soviet recruit the ways of the decadent west. 

They have a target; someone whose existence is inconvenient or whose death will be beneficial. He’d rather not know which. These are the only times he misses the Winter Soldier, but oh how badly he longs for that blessed tunnel vision when he stares down his scope and squeezes the trigger. Once he pretended the target was creeping up on Steve’s six and the shot was much easier. But it left him sick and shaky afterward and he couldn’t think about Steve for days without wanting to put the barrel of his sidearm in his mouth. Watching Natalia line up her sights gives him the same feeling and only his sheer terror at imagining this bright girl grow up to be alternately frozen and jerked about like a marionette keeps him by her side, makes him impart to her all his awful knowledge. 

Its still the closest thing he’s felt to peace, these days in New York with Natalia. In the guise of improving her cover they wander the city together. They eat American food that tastes at once familiar and strange, and Bucky isn’t certain if its his memory that’s faulty or if cooking has changed in the half-century he’s been gone. He aches to teach her the songs he knows, and once nearly drags her into a shabby, elegant old movie house that has King Kong- his and Steve’s King Kong- advertised on the marquee. But it would be disastrous to take her there, suicidal even. 

Instead he takes her to see a modern movie, one he can reasonably pass off as a film chosen at random to make her a believable American brat. Bucky hadn’t paid any attention until the villain pointed out that once you steal something truly valuable you won’t have any peace until the ones you stole it from are certain that you’re dead. Its a line he could have written himself. ‘Talia loves the movie, loves the resourcefulness shown by both the hero and the villain, although she stalwartly points out the blatant western propaganda in the story. As they walk back after the film, he praises her for using the word “jingoism” correctly although he points out that an American girl her age probably wouldn’t have. 

That night he disables the bugs in their hotel suite, puts in the Duke Ellington tape he’d stolen earlier and teaches her to swing dance. When he offers to let her stand on his toes she scoffs at him and insists he teach her to do it right. Two days later she’s been sent god knows where and he’s back in cryo. He doesn’t see her again until she’s a grown woman and he’s sending a bullet through her (wound, just a wound, not a kill) to reach his target. He should feel guilt and disgust at himself for hurting her but all he can think of is that she's alive, she still has that spark in her eye and she knows the name she was born with.


	5. HYDRA's Reach Exceeds Its Grasp But Not Because They Seek Heaven

Arithmetic had never been Bucky’s best subject even when he’d been motivated to do well. Now, when he tries to calculate the number of lives that could be saved by his escape from HYDRA versus the number of lives that would have to be lost to cover that escape versus the number that have already been snuffed out or vicariously ruined by him over the years he gets a dull thudding feeling, like a migraine somewhere in his chest cavity. He knows about 9/11, about the London Underground, about Oklahoma City and Madrid, and a dozen other man-made acts of chaos. He knows that his best shot at freedom might be making his own catastrophe, but he’s still can’t bring himself to go that far. 

Then aliens attack Manhattan. HYDRA is thrilled that the American team has subdued their intergalactic enemy, they certainly don’t want any other sentient species taking over their empire. But oh, do they ever want a look at their alien technology- all that lovely extraterrestrial weaponry. In particular they want a peek under the skin and inside the skull of the alien leader. Their reports on its success in Berlin have his neurologists gushing like schoolgirls at a Beatles concert. So they haul him out of his vault in one of Wall Streets oldest financial institutions and send him to collect what they’re already calling Asset A. 

Dimly Bucky suspects he should be jealous that his handlers are so eager to replace him. If they can only brutalize and manipulate this new, infinitely more powerful creature they won’t spare him a second thought. He takes one look at the devastation this alien being wrought on his hometown and makes damn sure that his team is too late to reclaim their coveted prize. Its one small step for Bucky Barnes, one giant leap for mankind. It saves millions of lives worldwide, and ensures that HYDRA- disappointed by the loss of their longed for toy- won’t allow his team to return empty handed. Only one of the Avengers heads off on his own after the Manhattan Incident, but fortunately for HYDRA- he’s the next best prize come home with.

*  
Steve looks so familiar Bucky wants to cry. He’s seen Brooklyn change every time he wakes up, the Army change, the whole damn country change. But Steve, who he now knows they found frozen in the Arctic Ocean (and doesn’t that sound so much like cryo it makes his skin crawl), looks and sounds exactly the way he remembers. Maybe a touch more melancholy.

Bucky’s whole body vibrates with the desire to look at Steve, to grasp him around the back of the neck and press their foreheads together. He wants to snap the necks of every HYDRA agent in the van with them including the driver, let the vehicle slam to a stop and climb into Steve’s lap proclaiming his true identity even before he opens Steve’s restraints. He wants to cling to Steve with his metal arm and never let go. But he can play out the moves in his head like a chess match, and the Winter Soldier absconding with Captain America now, while HYDRA owns SHIELD, and maybe some of the Avengers too for all he knows, can only lead to both of them being captured and all his painstakingly cultivated secrets being exposed.

So he stares ahead, muzzle firmly strapped around his face, and keeps his eyes away from Steve as his friend makes wry comments to the room at large.


	6. A Reunion of Strangers

They arrive back at the HYDRA base and Bucky nearly has a panic attack when he realizes (How could he not have earlier? How could he let himself get so distracted? Stupid. Stupid!) that he’ll be put back on ice while they haul Steve off and- what will they start him on? The cold? The hallucinogens? The sleep deprivation? He could wake up fifteen years in the future and find Steve had spent that time being tortured every way it was possible for a person to be tortured, or worse- find Steve as another deadly puppet like himself, or just find that they’d failed and put a bullet in him years before. Bucky had to stay awake, had to make them need him. But how? They kept him out of cryo for only two reasons; missions and repairs. There was no way he could come up with the first on the spur of the moment, it had to be the latter.

The truck stopped and his handlers leapt out to arrange the hand off, leaving only two of the newest recruits guarding Bucky and Steve. For a moment he sees himself tossing them out of the truck and making off with Steve like some bird of prey snatching its young out of the mouth of a predator. But that could only end with a bullet for Steve, if not here then ten, thirty, a hundred kilometers down the road. Instead he raises his metal arm, flexing the fingers and says to them in Russian, “This needs attention. It is malfunctioning.”

They ignore him, too intimidated or too full of their own importance or a bit of both, to answer the Asset. He continues to flex his hand, the metal plates sliding against each other as he does whatever his equivalent of knuckle-cracking is. Bucky is 80% certain that the two agents aren’t paying attention to him anymore. 80% wouldn’t be enough for him to take a shot, but its all he has now and it will have to do. 

Back when Steve was still just a shrimpy little kid, and Bucky was missing half his teeth from fights and the other half from pulling them out on dares, they’d both gotten real sick with the measles. The whole orphanage had in fact, although they all pulled through and they’d been quarantined for weeks while Bucky worried himself nearly white-haired about Steve. When the skinny punk’s rash finally cleared and he started to look human again the doctor had told the Sisters that Steve’s hearing had been damaged. A significant amount he'd said, enough to bus him out to the New York School for the Deaf in White Plains everyday during the school year.

Bucky hated having Steve away from him during the day. The Sisters told him that the other children there would be kind to Steve because they would understand what it was like, but Bucky knew better. He knew that some kids would be okay and some kids would be rotten and it didn’t matter whether they could hear each other or not. He knew Steve would find a way to stick his nose in even without the benefit of the English language. 

Steve wasn’t crazy about it either. He could still hear some, and his hearing got better over time. But he knew how hard Bucky took it when Steve came home with black eyes that he hadn’t been there to prevent. So Steve had started teaching Bucky the way the kids at the deaf school talked. He liked the hand signals that just the two of them knew there in the orphanage. When the Sisters decided that Steve could hear well enough after all (even if he couldn’t hear everything Bucky could) and the bus out to White Plains got too darn expensive, Steve and Bucky still kept using it.

Now Bucky breathes deep, focuses his attention on trying to remember everything Steve taught him back then. He hasn’t used it since the war, when he and Steve used to sign to each other in their tent at night all the things they couldn’t say out loud. He’s awkward at it, trying to keep his movements small so as not to attract the attention of the guards. He hopes to hell that Steve, with his eidetic memory, will remember how to read what he’s signing- and Christ, what would that eidetic memory do when faced with the chair? How would Steve’s brain respond? Bucky’s got to get him out, even if he has to send Steve off without telling him who he is, there can’t be any failure here- he is going to get Steve Rogers away from HYDRA.

He signs, “I can help you. Blink twice if you understand,” and keeps flexing his metal arm, cradling it in his human one, masking the message with nonsense gestures as best he can. Please let Steve get this. He repeats the message. Steve stares away from him, gaze fixed on the closed van doors. He gives two rapid blinks. Bucky wants to laugh with joy.

He raises one finger, makes a fist with the other hand and brings it to the raised finger, “Attack me. Attack my arm.” Two more blinks. Bucky is almost incandescent with glee. It occurs to him that he could tell Steve who he is. Steve gave him his name-sign back when they were kids: thumb and forefinger, held as though to pinch, raised to the mouth and then tilted quickly upwards, a yank-your-own-tooth-out gesture for all Bucky’s missing baby teeth. He wants so badly for Steve to know him. It would be the final nail in the coffin of self doubt he’s never quite managed to escape, that fear that he’s gone completely crazy living like this and invented this sweet, heroic, lost history to comfort himself. Revealing himself to Steve now would be the worst thing he can do. Steve’s never had a poker face, and he’s never been able to keep still if he thought someone he loved was in danger. Bucky settles for knowing that some of his memories are true- Steve exists, he taught Bucky sign language when they were kids. Which means they did grow up together, Steve did get sick and scare Bucky half to death.

The doors to the truck open. Bucky counts twenty armed men standing in formation outside. Bucky climbs out first. Behind him he can hear the magnetic restraints release from the bench Steve was sitting on. He hits the ground heavily as he exits the truck, awkward in his bonds. Steve’s still bound from elbow to fingertips and around the thighs forcing him to shuffle like an old man. Bucky walks slowly ahead of him a few paces, the other guards falling into line on either side of them. Abruptly Steve lands on him like a ton of bricks. Bucky’d thought he was prepared for it but he’s still caught off guard. 

He goes sprawling on his front with two hundred-odd pounds of Captain America plus at least sixty pounds of adamantium super-soldier body restraints on his back. Steve raises his arms and brings those heavy shackles down on Bucky’s metal arm. Sparks fly. Soldiers close in, hauling Steve off Bucky by his legs, jamming a cattle prod down on him. Steve lands face down against Bucky’s back and bizarrely the contact is so sweet and intimate that Bucky wants him to stay like that for hours even with Steve crushing all the air out of him. Steve is being dragged off him by inches. He bites down hard on Bucky’s shoulder where flesh and metal meet, tearing and worrying at the seam of scar tissue under his shirt. Its a sharp, mind-clearing pain, totally unlike the electrodes. Well- Bucky thinks- that’ll do the trick. He’s legitimately lost motor control over the arm now. He’d spent years trying to teach Steve how to fight dirty and it looks like the dumb punk finally took it to heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't know much about Deaf culture in the 30's, I have taken classes at the NY School for the Deaf and all my knowledge of modern Deaf culture comes from that. Please let me know if I've made any glaring errors.


	7. Steve Seeks Both Bucky and the Golden Chain That Binds Health and Body

Four days later they’d repaired his arm and- thank the patron saint of amnesiac super-assassins- they decide not to put him back into cryo, but to give him a mission. Steve’s not enough, no one is ever enough. They want the Widow back, they want the tech Stark denied them in 2010. He’s in the briefing room, his handlers giving him intel and locations on the four remaining, earth-bound Avengers when Steve staggers into the room. He looks drunk, Bucky thinks for a moment, except that Steve had always been an overly precise drunk, using a comically exaggerated focus. This Steve is bumping into walls and slurring his speech like a drunk in a movie and Bucky knows instantly that they’ve been keeping him in the White Room.

The White Room was quite possibly the worst place HYDRA ever conceived. It was a blank, glass-walled room surrounded by white corridors. The whole room was taken up by a pool at least 10 feet deep with a raft in the middle. Except it wasn’t a proper raft, more across between a raft and a rolling log. There was room enough for a man to stand or sit, but he constantly had to balance or else fall off into the water, getting an unpleasant shock from the electric collar they’d put on him. It didn’t hurt much, it wasn’t even frightening at first. Until he’d been in there for 19 hours, and he realized that he couldn’t sleep in the White Room. As soon as he dozed, he fell off and was jolted back into the disgusting brightness that never dimmed in there. Bucky wasn’t sure what his longest stretch in the White Room had been back in the baddest days, he couldn’t remember much about it and didn’t try hard to recover those memories. What he did remember was thinking dreamily about chewing his own tongue off and swallowing it if that was what it took to get out of there. Everything else was escapable, no matter how agonizing, but there was no escape from the White Room. He could sleep through any pain after that.

And here was Steve, knuckles bloody, a red ring on his neck where the shock collar had been, eyes blinking an unsteady rhythm; too slow then rapid-fire for as long as he could. He's fighting off microsleeps, and he’d still managed to break out of there. If he’d been even a fraction more coherent he might have gotten away, maybe even given HYDRA some real trouble. The circle of HYDRA agents stares at Steve. Steve blinks at him, “Bucky?” 

All heads swivel back in his direction like spectators at a tennis match. If Steve could help him- if it was the two of them fighting side by side- this room is two-thirds full of intelligence gatherers, admin and medical staff, only a few guards. Together they could take out all these people, secure the room, maybe steal the guards’ gear and slip out. But he can’t do it alone. He knows how many people he’s capable of subduing with varying types of weaponry, and right now he’s unarmed and there’s too many of them. He’d have to control all of them and manhandle all 260 pounds of lurching, hallucinating Steve. He might even have to incapacitate Steve if he turns violent or paranoid.

“Who the hell is Bucky.” 

He says it not as a question but as a statement to the room at large. Steve lunges for him, or tries to, crashing gracelessly into the conference table and shoving people out of the way. He clambers across the table at Bucky who falls instinctively back into a defensive pose. Steve’s scattering papers everywhere and the pencil-pushers are screaming and trying to get out of the room. HYDRA guards are whaling on him with their billy-clubs, one jabs him in the back with a cattle prod. It’s a bad idea. The shock galvanizes Steve, waking him up and spurring him forward. He slides face first off the table and Bucky catches him under the arms to keep him from smashing his nose on the floor. It’s a tell- the Winter Soldier would have let an assailant face plant and then put a boot on his neck- but Bucky does it without thinking.

Steve’s legs buckle under him and Bucky’s lowering him to the ground as gently as he can amidst all the confusion. Everyone’s shouting around him. The guards are yelling and cursing each other, Steve and the ones who weren’t watching their captive well enough at the White Room. A middle aged woman with fierce eyes scoops the fallen papers together protectively. She curses the guards for letting Steve get in here at all. Steve whispers something too low for Bucky to catch. He paws at Bucky’s face, his eyelids blinking heavily. Bucky seizes Steve’s questing hands, carefully restraining him. He can see Steve staring now at his metal hand, where it grips Steve’s own wrist. Over his friend's shoulder, Bucky can see a few of the guards have unholstered their guns. They’re hesitating though, several of the administrative agents are wailing about keeping Steve alive, about how valuable he is. 

He has to act fast. Bucky wraps his metal arm around Steve in a half-nelson and drags him to his feet. An audience of HYDRA members follows him as he marches Steve out of the conference room and into the nearest medical bay. He deposits Steve on the gurney. Steve curls up on his side and immediately closes his eyes. Before anyone can stop him, Bucky’s seized one of the pre made sedative hypos and driven it into Steve’s hip. He watches Steve’s hands reach for him a few seconds longer before dropping softly onto the blanket. 

Bucky’s own hands itch to brush the hair off Steve’s face, he wants to whisper to him to sleep now, everything will be alright. He regards his audience. “The prisoner is contained. Shall we continue?”


	8. A Triumvirate of the Damaged Plots a Rescue

Steve is still out when they send him south after the Widow. It hurts Bucky so badly to leave him that he actually crawls back into the Winter Soldier’s impermeable skin for the space of a few breaths. He hates how good it feels, what an unspeakable relief, to let the memories and the grief and the fear sink to the bottom of his mind and be the tip of the iceberg again. It wracks him with guilt to let himself become that thing again, but he consoles himself with the thought that if the Soldier is anything, he’s effective- and he’s never failed a mission. 

According to his intel Natalia and her long-bow enthusiast friend went to Mexico following the battle of New York, possibly further into Central America. It helps that she is the first one they’re sending him after, since she is the only one he’s entirely sure of. That may be the first stroke of luck he’s had since 1944. He finds her safe house outside Managua and helps himself to a glass of milk while he waits for the return of Nat and her new comrade in arms.

She clears the room properly- the way he’d taught her- and she keeps her sights on him even through the shock of recognition. The archer slowly enters behind her.

“What. The actual. Fuck.” he says, bow drawn and an arrow with a nasty looking head pointed casually at him. 

Bucky sets his glass on the table and wipes his mouth. _”Talia, I need your help.”_ She regards him coolly, gun still raised. _”Who needs my help?”_

_“Yasha.”_ he says. _”Yasha needs your help,”_ and he tells her everything.

As he talks, in English now, the archer- Barton- loses some of his devil-may-care swagger. He keeps shooting furtive glances at Bucky, looking away again as though something about him is painful to the eyes. Natalia- Natasha now- he reminds himself, is all business. “You have to take Clint and I back but it can’t look too easy,” she says, “Once we’re in the facility where Steve’s being kept we can make our move.”

“They won’t let me stay- I’m to be sent after Stark once you are secured. They already have SHIELD, now HYDRA wants the rest of your Avengers. If you’re taken into the base you’ll be on your own.” She gives him the look she used to give him when he doubted her ability to finish an entire footlong dog with fixings. “Not even you can take on all of HYDRA,” he smiles.

“She won’t be alone,” Barton states.  
Bucky shrugs. “They didn’t ask for you. Natalia’s the one they want.”

Barton looks offended. “Even better, I love being underestimated. It makes me feel all warm inside.” 

“If I bring you in they may not even keep you alive.”

“We’ll just have to sell them on how essential Clint is,” says Natasha. 

“How do you propose we do that?”

“What exactly are you implying, Sergeant?” Clint demands jokingly. Bucky meets his eye and for a moment grins in spite of himself. Then reality comes rushing back in and he looks away. It’s so alien- the easy camaraderie he has with this woman he hasn’t spoken to since she was eight and this man he’s never met before. This is the first normal conversation he’s had in decades and it’s like using an atrophied limb- one it might be better to cut off and discard than try to save. Making friends with Hawkeye is not the objective here.

“Give them Clint first.”

“Excuse me?” yelps Clint. He gapes at her with his mouth open. Bucky might be described as gaping too, although he keeps his mouth sternly closed. She ignores them, “You take Clint in alone, tell them I eluded you.”

Bucky raises an eyebrow at her, she raises hers right back. “Tell them I eluded you, but that you know I’ll be coming to save him. Clint can get close to Steve and when I infiltrate it will be plausible enough even for HYDRA. And you can go invite Tony and Bruce to the party.”

It’s not a bad plan, although it keeps him away from Steve for long enough to make his skin creep. Still, something nags at him. “They own SHIELD, what makes you so sure they don’t own the others too?”

Barton lets out a barking laugh. Natasha cracks a tiny smile. They exchange a glance.  
“You don’t actually know much about the Avengers, do you?” Clint asks. “Have you seen the footage from Manhattan?” Bucky shakes his head no. “You should check it out, man. Its… enlightening.”

They part after that. Tomorrow, Bucky will return and “overpower” Clint, but for now he must report to his handlers. He slips out into the darkness, but before he returns he doubles back to the safe house. He trusts Natasha. Besides Steve she is the only one in the world he does trust, and he knows her instincts are good. Still, all his paranoia is hard learned and he needs to know more about Barton if he’s to have a modicum of faith in this plan. Lying on the roof, he listens through the bugs he planted before they’d returned. Natasha has removed ten of them but the eleventh is still in place. 

“Did you know- “ Clint sounds shaken, his bravado dimmed again.

“I knew he was different. After he shot me I tried to tell myself he was just part of another sick game they were playing with me, but even then I knew he was something else.” He’s never heard her this quiet before. “When I got out- I could have told them. Fury or Hill or Coulson- I should have made it clear.”

“They wouldn’t have been able to do anything. He was on ice most of the time.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that I let him keep hurting people. I let them keep hurting him. He was kind to me, and I believed the lies about him.”

Bucky hears rustling noises, someone sliding over to sit beside someone else. “He said HYDRA’s controlling SHIELD. If that’s true, telling them about him might have done more harm than good.”

“I’m blaming myself for more than I deserve, I know that,” she says, “But Clint? I do owe him. The debt may not be as large as I feel it, but it’s still there. And I’m going to fix it.”

He has to leave then, before he gives himself away. Because he can’t hear anymore and still send her into HYDRA’s nest without him there to watch her back.


	9. Experiments With Results Varying in Duration and Quality

Bucky finds Dr. Banner doing yoga in a glass-walled room on the top floor of Stark's mansion. It must be over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in there and Banner is soaked with perspiration as he shifts poses but his face looks serene. By now Bucky has seen the footage from New York, yet its still hard to reconcile that creature of unchecked aggression with the calm, collected man before him. He thinks of the rubble that was left after the battle, and the irony of two men- both borne from the same impulse of science to tinker with humanity but with such different results- fighting on the same side. Banner had been trying to recreate Erskine’s serum, had he been expecting to become like Steve? What a doubly cruel shock it must have been to become…. _that_ instead. Not for the first time, Bucky feels sure that its Steve who’s the fluke. The serum is a monster-maker, going by the results seen in Banner, Schmidt and himself. 

Banner hasn’t noticed him yet; his eyes are still shut and his breathing steady and deep. At least that’s what Bucky assumes until one of Stark’s suits attacks him from behind. He allows it to overpower him with only a token effort. These people have very poor knowledge of how to handle a prisoner Bucky thinks when he’s brought face to face with Banner, Stark and a woman he recognizes from his intel as Stark Industries’ CEO Pepper Potts. He's in some interior room of Stark Tower and the suit is still restraining him, but they've taken no other precautions.

“I’m calling Phil,” she says without hesitation. 

“No don’t,” he says, grateful that they’re so unprofessional as to leave him ungagged. He skips preliminaries and plays the trump card that Natasha gave him to establish his allegiance. “The cards Fury showed you, the ones that belonged to Agent Coulson- there were four of them: Captain America on tour in Milwaukee and Wichita, Cap supports the Boy Scouts and Cap’s victory garden.” 

Three pairs of eyes regard him with increasing suspicion and disbelief. “I know that from Natasha. She and Barton and Steve are going to need your help.”  
**********

Seeing Tony Stark is not the first time Bucky’s come face to face with the damage he’s wrought. There have been many children or siblings or lovers or friends who’d lost someone to the Winter Soldier and whose grief had driven them to become a thorn in HYDRA’s side worthy of their own visit from the assassin. This is, however, the first time he’s met one of his victim’s family and not been there to kill them too. Stark is brilliant, stubborn and decisive- all traits he can almost remember in Howard. But there’s a brittleness to the son; he’s too ready with a snarky comeback or a bolt of power from his suit. He’s a man accustomed to defending himself on all sides, and Bucky can tell that he’s uneasy having an unknown assassin in the same room with the two people he cares for most. 

“We can’t involve SHIELD, we can’t even involve Hill or Fury in case someone else is listening,” Potts is saying.

“Not a problem, don’t need ‘em,” answers Stark. He’s rapidly scanning Bucky’s robotic arm as part of their uneasy truce, creating a 3D blueprint of all its intricacies. “Venus de Milo here can get us into the base, we can do the rest.”

“You mean the rest of whatever’s left to do after Barton and Romanov are through with them?” she retorts dryly. 

Stark taps his stylus impatiently against the back of Bucky’s metal hand to shoo him away now that the scan is complete. “Jarvis, store Mr. Barnes’ schematics for later, Pepper’s got me worried that we’re going to miss the party.”  
*****************************

Bucky knows a great many of HYDRA’s secrets. He knows about coups they’ve started, wars they’ve tipped one way or another, drugs they’ve introduced into common use, men and women they’ve had killed. He knows enough secrets to fill a book, but he doesn’t know all of them.

When he’d handed Clint over he’d given his handlers the story they’d all agreed on and it seemed to have worked. The agents had looked Clint over briefly, then he’d disappeared into the back of an unmarked van. Natasha was the big fish, and they barely bothered to restrain Barton at all. All their attention would be on her when she came, and Clint would be able to enjoy the freedom their contempt offered. Bucky had not been there when she and Barton had fought side by side on countless missions before, still he knew from experience how well Natasha fought with an ally worthy of her.

But Bucky had not been there in 1985 when the Red Room had programmed their triggers and failsafes into every new agent. He had not been there in 1998 when Natasha defected to SHIELD and the psychiatrists and spymasters who debriefed her had studied her carefully, monitoring the dancing electric impulses in her brain as it responded to certain words in Russian, Georgian, German and Mandarin. If he had been there he could have listed a dozen other phrases, some of them requiring two people to produce an effect. And he wasn’t there now, when Natasha slipped into their base and two men who were dressed as guards but whose actual rank was much higher said to each other, “Where are you spending your summer this year?” “On the shores of Lake Lerna.” It might almost have been an ordinary conversation, one they did not expect anyone in particular to overhear.

If he had been there he would have seen Natasha try to block out the sound of the second man’s response before it could register, and he would have seen her be a fraction of a second too late. Long dormant neural pathways flared into life, her olfactory nerves reported the scent of freshly cut grass and Natasha’s muscles began to disobey her.


	10. A Kinder, Gentler Machine Gun Hand

In the end they decide to wait for morning to make their next move. Banner’s gone off to some field station to talk to a Dr. Foster. The trio of Stark, Potts and Banner had been reluctant to let Bucky out of their collective sight and equally reluctant to leave him alone with any one of them at a time. Stark had tried to send Pepper off for the night while Bucky stayed at the mansion but she merely smiled the kind of smile that said she was having none of it. 

Stark’s been fixated on the blueprints of Bucky’s arm for the past five hours since Banner left, while Pepper monitors goings-on at Stark Industries on her laptop and Bucky sits staring into space, running through possible outcomes to the next 72 hours and trying to replicate Banner’s zen look. There are so many mines to step on, so many ways for this to end in corpses and rubble, so few ways to keep a select few sets of lungs and spines and kidneys intact and working the way they should. Bucky sweats and exerts more control over his breathing. 

“Jarvis, could you turn the air up?” asks Potts from the opposite end of the sofa. A moment later, “Tony, could you stop monopolizing Jarvis enough to let him keep the house a balmy 74 degrees?” Bucky looks up. Potts has shed her blazer and hose. She’s pulled her long strawberry hair up on top of her head but he can see beads of sweat running down her neck. He glances over at Stark, whose black T-shirt is sticking to him. Tony takes a stylus out of his mouth. “I’m not,” he says. The stifling air feels unnaturally still as the three of them exchange a puzzled, uneasy glance. Then everything happens at once.

Bucky and Tony both dive for Pepper, Bucky reaching her first. The two of them hit the floor as the wall behind erupts into a shower of glass and concrete. Over the roar in his ears, Bucky can hear Tony shouting for Jarvis. The row of Iron Man suits lights up. “Oh no,” Stark cries, swiping across multiple touch screens,“No no no no no. Pepper- ” She’s crawled over to a panel with a single, red button and slams it hard. Vault style doors close over the rogue-activated suits. 

“That’ll only buy us some time,” she pants, “Its meant to keep people out, not them in.” Before she’s finished her sentence someone strikes Bucky from behind, a heavy magnetic cuff fixed to his metal wrist and a strong, lean forearm across his windpipe. “Widow?” Tony gapes, bewildered. “предатель,” she hisses in Bucky’s ear and his heart freezes. She whispers to him “они знают все сейчас.” 

Bucky lets his knees go loose and brings his whole weight crashing down on her. It shakes her, but not enough. Tony and Pepper watch wide-eyed for a moment, uncertain who’s side to take. Then Stark moves to his keyboard, typing frantically and calling for Jarvis again. His movement attracts Natasha’s attention and she’s fired four shots that would have taken him right in the skull had Pepper not dragged him out of the way. “Natasha stop! What’s going on?” she yells. Stark’s doing something complicated and technical with his wristwatch now, the CPU a smoking, bullet-riddled mess beside him. 

The vault doors ripple as the rogue suits fight their way out. Bucky manages to force Natasha’s arm off his throat and sink his teeth into the flesh of her forearm. She grunts in pain and kicks him up and off of her. “Stark- guns! I need guns!” he shouts.

“Don’t have any!” Stark roars back. 

Natasha is coming at him with the Widow’s Bite now and Bucky only just escapes a direct body hit by blocking with his metal arm. “How can you not have any guns?”

“A gun in the home is 22% more likely to kill or injure the homeowner or a family member! Pepper, the Mark VIII’s in the bedroom, I’m switching it to manual. I need you to override the lab doors.” 

Pepper throws herself against the heavy lever keeping the lab sealed off from the rest of the house as the suit appears answering its creator’s summons. Tony braces for contact but Natasha sends a well aimed grenade his way and he and the suit go flying in opposite directions. “What’s wrong with her?” Pepper shrieks.

“She’s been triggered,” Bucky grates, trying to keep his grip on both her wrists- stopping her from launching another attack. “HYDRA- both of you just get out- ”

“Wait, young!” Tony shouts, his eyes suddenly bright “Kneel! Young! The off-switch!”. He’s got both boots and one gauntlet on but the remaining pieces of the Mark VIII are scattered smoking across the floor. Bucky’s hearing is tinny from the explosions and his focus is directed entirely at the assassin bending his human arm the wrong way by increasingly painful degrees. He’s not sure what Stark is saying. But Pepper is gaping at him too, even as she tries to haul Tony up out of the lab. The boots are malfunctioning making it impossible for him to fly or walk properly and they stagger together. Tony pulls away from Pepper, flailing toward the jukebox in the corner of the lab. “Kneel young!”

Understanding dawns in Pepper’s face. She releases Tony’s hand and races to the jukebox, “What song?” The vault door is bending in earnest now, straining under the impressions of metal fists nearly breaking through. Natasha has both legs wrapped around Bucky’s waist- she’s startlingly strong- as they grapple together. Three HYDRA drones come darting in through the shattered outside wall, humming as they hover around Stark’s motherboard. Tony lurches towards them, trying to swat them away from his precious data. A drone shoots a spark of current into his temple and Tony goes cross-eyed for a moment. He opens his mouth to answer Pepper but all that comes out is a garble, nearly inaudible over the pounding of the suits and the crash of falling plaster.

Fuck it, thinks Pepper, and punches in a song. 

Bucky’s vision has gone spotty and his head is swimming. For a moment, as Natasha’s grip on him turns gentle he thinks he must still be teaching her to dance. But he doesn’t know this song. A fierce voice sings about one more kid that’ll never go to school, never get to fall in love, never get to be cool and a different kind of grimness ignites in Natasha’s eyes. She types something rapidly into her wrist communicator. The drones drop uselessly to the floor, the rogue suits fall silent and Tony’s finally able to climb out of the Mark VIII boots. He crawls to Pepper, laying his head on her lap. “Remind me never to get rid of any of my vinyl.” 

Bucky, Pepper and Tony lie panting for too brief a time while Natasha, looking far too collected for someone who’d a)been fighting hand-to-hand with a super-assassin and b)just shaken off latent brainwashing, strips the defunct drones down to spare parts. She and Bucky regard each other. He thinks of what she’d- what HYDRA- had whispered to him. 

“Traitor,” they’d sneered, “We know everything now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry for the long wait guys. I'm trying my damnedest not to let that happen again, but a girl's got grad school and weddings to be in and sundry other crap that drives plot bunnies away. Thanks for sticking with me!
> 
> All Russian courtesy of Google translate.


	11. Clint Barton Would Rather Have a Full Bottle in Front of Him

Carnies can’t be scared of pain and Clint had been an exemplary carny. He’s like a kid that way still. He’s never outgrown the impulse to jump over rather than walk around, never thinks something might be too far or too high until he’s already midair- knee cartilage and back spasms and jammed discs be damned. Clint likes to pretend pain is the only thing a person can reasonably be scared of. He’s usually very good at it.

When Barnes hands him wordlessly over to the HYDRA agents, the assassin is wound tight as a tripwire beneath his blank gaze but Clint feels calm, even jocular. Barnes disappears and a team of guards and doctors strip-searches Clint, gives him a full-body scan, measures his arms and legs with calipers, studiously ignoring his jokes about the TSA. They bring him to a plexiglass cell, suspiciously similar to the one SHIELD designed for Bruce on the Helicarrier Clint thinks. He and Steve are neighbors.

Steve’s eyes widen when he sees Clint and his already despairing face looks even more pained. He places a palm against the glass between them, “Clint?” Steve’s lips form his name but there’s no sound. Whatever these cells are made of is apparently soundproofed. Clint gives Steve a small wave.

“I’m here to rescue you,” he signs, grinning. Steve just looks confused and infinitely weary and Clint feels like an ass. “Barnes recognized you. He’s helping us get you out. Natasha will be here soon.” Steve nods and raises his hands to sign back, then seems to lose the strength. He shakes his head, sinking down on his cot and pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. Clint wonders what they’ve been doing to him in the past 24 hours.

After what feels like several hours- judging by the state of his bladder and how bored he is- Natasha comes striding down the corridor with a stately, scholarly looking woman carrying a tablet. They stop in front of him and Steve, their lips moving rapidly in a language that isn’t English. Nat’s face is as neutral as Bucky’s had been, her gaze as empty when she looks at him. It might send a tinge of worry through any other teammate, but Clint has worked with her long enough that he’d trust-fall off the Grand Canyon if she said she would catch him. She nods once to her companion, then turns and leaves without a backwards glance at him. That’s ok, that’s fine- she’s biding her time. Clint isn’t worried. The scholarly woman taps at her tablet a few moments longer. On his left, Steve watched the whole exchange between her and Natasha without expression. Clint has never seen him be so still, it feels wrong in someone as action-driven as the Cap. The woman looks up at them and smiles. Its the ugliest smile Clint has ever seen. She takes something from her pocket and passes it through the slot into his cell. It hits the floor with a soft clink. It’s the gold arrow necklace he’d given to Natasha when she had first joined SHIELD.  
**

They’ve been trying the mind-wipe on Steve. Twice now, once before Clint had arrived and once after, they’d taken Steve away to the room with the chair Barnes had described. Both times were failures. At least in HYDRA’s eyes they were failures. Whatever the technology is that they’ve been using to streamline the Winter Soldier’s brainwashing doesn’t work on Steve and workplace morale is low. Its making them antsy. Antsy HYDRA agents are no fun. Clint really should have seen what was coming, but in the endless hours since he’d seen Natasha turn her back on him and the HYDRA woman had given him her necklace his thoughts have been fractured like an unfinished crossword. They need a control subject.

He doesn’t scream when they come for him. Not even when they force him down and strap him in, the chair hugging him like a clinging metal octopus. Even before they force a mouthguard on him, he can’t scream; he’s beyond screaming. The panic attack started in the corridor, when his cell door opened and he’d suddenly remembered all the other things there were to be afraid of besides physical pain. Like having your mind stripped bare. Like being made to hurt your friends. Like losing everything good and bad and yours.

Nat’s sharp wit and her bright hair, Pizza Dog’s warm ears, the way he can only smell the homey smell of his apartment when he’s been away for days, Kate’s brilliant skill and her ridiculous car, Queens and sex and Starbucks and helping to save the world- he’s going to lose all of it. His muscle memory will remain, of course it will. The only thing that makes him worth a damn to these people is the thing that will make him a danger to everyone he cares about. Again.

Electricity ricochets through him. His whole body curls like a leaf within the restraints, every muscle contracted to the point of pain. They let him writhe, then gradually he goes limp. Everything that was tensed now loose. He’s tearing up and drooling when they take the mouthguard out. He’s no more in control of his body now than he was with all that current in him. He’s a plastic bag drifting through the wind. He’s- wait. That’s a song. That’s an American song. A vapid, wonderful, overproduced, beautiful American pop song. That’s Katy Perry. He loves Katy Perry. She’s a goddam firework and he’s goddam Clinton Francis Barton. He’s goddam Hawkeye and he’s an idiot. 

Realization sweeps through him with almost as much force as the electricity. It didn’t work. The chair didn’t work. He should have guessed. It hadn’t been working on Barnes. It wasn’t working on Steve not because of the serum, but because it didn’t fucking work. He’s still him. But they don’t know that, and if he can do what Barnes did an pretend than maybe this whole clusterfuck can be salvaged. And he hadn’t peed himself. Clint feels very proud.

He’s so rung out with relief and muscle fatigue that he doesn’t have to act when they lead him back to his cell. Steve is lying on his cot again, they must have taken him off for some interrogation or other and now he’s wearing light blue scrubs instead of his khakis and t-shirt. Clint avoids looking at Steve until his guards leave. There’s got to be a way he can communicate to Steve what’s happened without giving himself away. It takes him five minutes to think of one- he’s on fire today.

Plastering himself against the wall dividing them he starts tracing the seam of the glass idly with one finger, drawing invisible patterns in dots and lines. Dot dot dot, dash, dot dot dot dot, dash dot- he writes Steve’s name in morse code over and over. He keeps his mouth slack and rocks gently back and forth, sketching his message in different, random places against the wall. Steve ignores him, curled up fetal position with his back to Clint, one arm thrown up over his face. He has to turn over sometime. But when he does- oh god when he finally does.

Steve had been pale, as close to sickly looking as Clint had ever seen him, for the past 48 hours. His eyes were haunted, bloodshot and ringed with dark circles. His massive frame sagged with an immense, unseen burden. But he had been solid, dependable Steve under it all- granite grown over with moss but still there. Now- Steve shifts onto his back, his arm falls to his side and Clint’s breath catches- where Steve’s rigid he’s rigid like a corpse in rigor, where he’s relaxed he’s deflated and empty. Now that he’s on his back, Clint can see that they’ve shaved off the front third of Steve’s stupid corn-blonde hair and his brow is crossed by a jagged red scar.


	12. Things Tony Stark Can and Can't Do With Windows 95

Its 2 a.m. and Bucky, Tony, Pepper and Natasha are speeding east into the Mojave to meet up with Banner and Dr. Foster. They’d taken Stark’s Rolls Phantom- the only armored car he had at the moment, and Tony’d continued to stream Neil Young throughout the leather-scented interior of the car. Natasha only needed the opening notes of the song to counteract her conditioning, but no one had objected to the music. She and Pepper are asleep in the backseat; the deep, uncomplicated slumber Natasha’s one obvious concession to the churning Bucky knows must be happening in her brain. Nothing exhausts you like the desperate attempt to drive your own brain when someone else has taken charge. He watches the night-lit highway whip past them and feels more than ever like HYDRA’s wind-up toy, spinning uselessly in circles and getting no nearer to where they’re actually causing damage.

“They’ll be okay,” Stark interrupts his thoughts, eyes still on the road ahead, “Cap’s more resilient than one of those inflatable bop-it bags, and Barton’s already shaken brainwashing from an alien super-being. That’s like chicken pox, right? You only get it once.” He grimaces as he finishes speaking, failing to amuse even himself.

“You don’t like me being around the people you love.” 

Stark looks startled. He grips the wheel tighter. “Well, I don’t have many to spare,” he pauses and looks uncomfortable, “And you killed my parents, didn’t you?”

Bucky licks his lips, “Probably.” They ride in silence for a time. Bucky does not want to have this conversation- not now with Steve in danger, and Steve’s archer friend who Bucky’d allowed to walk into that viper’s nest. The plan has gone to shit and if anything happens to Steve because he’d been too cowardly to actually try to get away from them in the past fifty years he doesn’t know what he’ll do. But Tony Stark is Steve’s ally, and he will need as many people fighting to save Steve as he can get. 

“I’m not being evasive. It’s very probable that they did assassinate Howard and that they did use me to do it. I just- it happened when the chair still worked. There’s a lot that I don’t remember.” 

Stark nods. “We’ve both brought bloody, awful things into the world. We both probably thought we were doing the right thing at the time. At least you never profited by it.”

At dawn they reach Dr. Foster’s field station outside of Las Vegas. Bucky instinctively takes a read on everyone there; Dr. Foster bright eyed and inquisitive, Banner looking rumpled and more careworn than he had in Malibu and a man called Thor with a face that could go as easily into joyous laughter as berserker rage. Bucky can’t think of him as a god, some disconnect in his brain between his Catholic upbringing and all his desperate unanswered prayers during his years with HYDRA. 

They hold their war council around Dr. Foster’s campfire in the early desert morning. Clint and Steve are still being held in a base in Connecticut, heavily fortified and with tunnels providing several clandestine ways in and out. But now that his and Natasha’s covers are blown any attack- overt or sneak attack- could put Steve and Clint’s lives in danger. Thor proposes a shock-and-awe frontal assault on the base. Natasha counters that while effective, unleashing the Hulk, Tony’s firepower and Mjolnir simultaneously could inadvertently injure or kill the captives. They’ve been arguing the pros and cons of a tactical assault, or possibly a counter-hostage maneuver where Bucky would take Banner into the base as a sort of human suicide vest for half an hour when Pepper, Banner, Stark and Natasha each receive an email alert. Pepper opens hers first and her face goes grey under her bright hair.

“What is it?” Tony demands, taking the tablet from her. The others crowd around him, all except Bucky. He can hear the faint sounds of whatever they’re watching. There’s no speech that he can make out, maybe a gunshot. Dr. Foster’s face crumples into tears. Banner turns away, shaking violently. Natasha’s eyes darken and she glances at Bucky. “Its a fake,” Tony states, “I could fake that with Windows 95.”

Bucky rises and takes the tablet from him. The screen is dark, the replay arrow illuminated in its center. He taps it and sees Steve- pale with bloodshot eyes and a bandaged head. He looks so much like the sickly kid Bucky used to fret over that for a second he’s not sure what year it is. Then a HYDRA doctor presses the barrel of her gun against the back of Steve’s head and fires. The camera lens is struck with gore but behind it Bucky can see Steve slump forward and lie still.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter is already written- I had to write that before I wrote this for obvious reasons- and will be up ASAP, just want to give it a polish.
> 
> Comments are cookies that lure plot bunnies in. Do it for the plot bunnies.


	13. Even a Many-Headed Serpent May Nourish a Viper At Its Breast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What really happened to Steve.

~ 72 hours earlier ~

A man moves carefully through the halls of the HYDRA base at night. The care in his movements is twofold- that of a thief moving with calculated stealth and that of an old man mindful of sparing himself any painful bending or contorting. He has no reason to fear the night guards here, they are simple enough to believe that he has authorization for some highly classified purpose and single-minded enough never to question that everyone who works for HYDRA is as pants-pissingly awestruck by it as they are. Cut off one head and two will take its place, but a creature with a hundred heads can be a hundred fools or a hundred narcissists or a hundred savages or any combination thereof. It can be ninety-nine heads looking one way and the hundredth head left to its own devices. 

He thumbs through Captain Rogers’ brain scans. The prefrontal cortex repaired itself with breathtaking speed- full regeneration from a 70% neural severance in less than twelve hours. Wonderful. And these philistines saw it merely as a means of keeping their captive docile. There were endless possibilities locked in Rogers’ cells- his mitochondria? Ribosomes? DNA? RNA? Was it on a cellular level or a molecular level? So many unanswered questions and all they cared about was how to make one man’s will do their bidding. Why not grow their own? Why not use what was remarkable about the super soldier and discard what was pedestrian (which, to his mind, was nearly everything else). Pierce and his predecessors had spent decades playing with their wind-up toy and never thought to look further. 

***************************************

An organization being thoroughly evil doesn’t necessarily make it incorruptible. Pepper or Tony, or even Bruce would have spotted the self-serving behavior of someone engaged in a little corporate espionage but Clint- well, Clint has no further knowledge of stealing company secrets than can be learned from watching Willy Wonka. Besides which, he’s under a great deal of stress at the moment.

They come for him every six hours, by his probably rather inaccurate count. They walk him to the chair and give him enough of a shock to stand his hair on end, and he has to give them his performance of drooling and mewling and jerking. They come for Steve once a day, right about the time when the scar on his forehead is beginning to fade from hideous red to equally hideous pink and something like light returns to his eyes. He’ll be gone for a few hours and then they’ll wheel him back in with fresh stitches. Clint keeps his face neutral and tries not to think about how much Steve’s face looks like that of a badly shaken toddler he’d seen once in the ER. HYDRA had hollowed Barnes out, he knows that, but at least they hadn’t left him empty. Clint hopes to god he never has to see whatever nightmare lab down here holds a shelf full of jars of super-soldier frontal lobes pickling in Formalin.

In between his little jaunts to the chair are hours of excruciating tedium and dread. Clint’s heard the old adage about war being months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror but he’s never before realized that they can occur simultaneously. He discovers that yes, in fact they can, when his observers begin giving him endless series of tasks after each programming session.

Stand on one foot, twenty minutes. Kneel, three hours. Lie face down, fifty minutes. Stand on the other foot, kneel on a bed of uncooked rice, hold his arms out straight. Forty minutes, ninety minutes, two hours. On and on and on. If he ever has kids he’s never playing Simon Says with them. Fuck that game. 

He hasn't seen Natasha again since that first day- they’d taken her necklace back and he’d had to let them with no show of emotion. He can’t think about her right now, about what they might be doing to her or making her do with machines that might actually work or that unenhanced humans might not recover from. He follows their orders and wills Steve to heal faster. 

HYDRA start collecting tissue samples from Steve and him- blood, saliva, cheek cells. No semen yet, thank Artemis the virgin goddess of archers everywhere. They give him meds to make him sleep at what he assumes must be nighttime, before the fluorescent lights dim and the swarm of scalpel wielders thins to a skeleton crew. Clint hides them in his cheek until they leave each night. 

And then the others come. The camera lights stop blinking and the guard at the door wordlessly admits three scientists that he might have seen during the day, except now they come masked. They come for Steve and just Steve so far. At first he’d feared they were there for some sick sexual kicks over the graveyard shift but all they’ve done so far is repeat the same tests the daytime crew does- taking blood and skin, and a tooth from the back of Steve’s mouth on the first night. A younger man and woman with cold, inquisitive eyes and an older, dark skinned man who moves more slowly and seems to be in charge. They come three times and its only on the last visit, when he catches a glimpse of the older man giving the guard a folded pile of bills that it dawns on him what they’re doing. The crazy bastards are stealing HYDRA property, spying on the most valuable intel their company has and pilfering it for their own ends. 

One night things get even weirder. They come with a camera and tripod, as well as their usual cart of surgical supplies. Clint lies on his back, one arm thrown up ostensibly to block the light but also to hide his watching eyes from the lunatics next door. Steve also lies on his back, staring up at the ceiling. He doesn’t move even when the woman picks out the stitches in his head and reopens the incision. The younger man sets the camera up facing them while the older takes a small metal object, about the size of a double-a battery and inserts it carefully into the open incision in Steve’s scalp with a pair of forceps. When its stitched in place and loosely bandaged, Clint sees him brush what remains of Steve’s hair into its old, right-hand part. It makes him shudder.

The two men step back behind the camera and the woman draws a pistol from under her lab coat. She places it against the back of Steve’s head and grips his collar with her other hand. The dark skinned man begins counting down for her on his fingers. Five, four, three, two- on one she pulls the trigger. Blood and bits of bandage spray out from the front of Steve’s head. Steve slumps forward and she gives him a little shove, sending him forward his face on the thin pillow. The younger man stops filming and the three of them gather curiously to watch their footage play back. They seem satisfied with it. The older man breaks down the camera equipment while the two others wheel in a gurney and manhandle Steve on to it.

There’s a bloody crater on Steve’s temple but he’s not dead. Clint can see that his eyes are open but he seems no more aware of his surroundings than he had been before they came. The two younger HYDRA agents have their backs to their older mentor and Clint actually rises up on his elbows when he sees the man draw a pistol from the camera case. The silencer was already attached and ready to go. He shoots his two companions in quick succession, neatly through the back of the head. When he turns to replace the gun Clint throws himself back into his former position in bed, praying that his movements went unnoticed. The man packs everything they came with onto the gurney with Steve and wheels him out. He makes no effort to conceal the bodies. Clint’s breathing is coming in panicked, shallow gasps now- he can’t let this man disappear with Steve, but if he gives himself away… If he blows his only chance of telling the others what’s happened to Steve… Clint forces himself to lie still and as the man passes his cell there is something, behind the surgical mask and cap, something about the dark, determined eyes and the profile, something uncannily familiar about the man.

**********************************

He’s waiting for Bucky to bring the medicine. It seems like its taking a long time. Maybe they were a few dollars short and Bucky had to wheedle a few days worth of credit. He’ll be home soon, Steve’s sure of it. Its just this heat, and the pain in his head rotating between sharp and dull, sharp and dull, dull and icebladelightneedle. Someone is beating his head with a hammer, every alternate strike forces a spike deeper into his brain. Who is beating him with a hammer? Thor has a hammer. And Steve is so hot, he’s dead and they’re burning him on a pyre like the Asgardian funerals Thor had described. They’re burning him because he’s a dead hero. But that doesn’t make any sense because he’s no hero. Not with his crooked, skinny limbs- no, the pyre isn’t for him, he’s just the kindling. Heaped amongst countless other human bodies, more emaciated than his own ever was, all of them burning. He jerks away, tries to call for someone- Bucky. Its Bucky that they’re sending up as the burnt offering. That’s right because Bucky deserves Valhalla, Bucky is a hero- the only Howling Commando to give his life in the service of his country- but its wrong too. Why is it wrong? There’s too much ice around him, the flames won’t catch. The ice melts in tiny increments, drops fall maddeningly on Steve’s face. Fluid sliding down the crease of his nose, over his mouth. Its Bucky, crying over him- keening like Steve’s never heard from anyone over the age of five- begging Steve not to leave him, promising to make the Sisters get Steve’s medicine. Steve’s confused, wasn’t Bucky just out to get his medicine? That Bucky was grown and this one is a boy, but he’s crying over Steve, begging him to find away across the flaming chasm between them. And Steve’s going to jump- even with his useless lungs and weak legs- he’s going to jump because Bucky won’t go without him. Then he’s flying, spinning through the air and he thinks he might just make it across. He falls for a long time and lands without noticing. 

Now he’s still. In pain and immobilized and he remembers- HYDRA. And Bucky. Steve opens his eyes and finds himself staring up into the unsmiling face of Nick Fury.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've always been fascinated by this mythic standing Hydra gives itself- this evil monolith that can survive for decades with an unending supply of followers willing to die for it. Its certainly evil, and reasonably effective at times, but bottom line: its just people. And people are flawed and selfish. And that's why empires decay from within.
> 
> Also, one of my favorite characters from an entirely different story has been trying to get into the Captain America universe for a long time, and he finally made it in. Any guesses as to who it could be?


	14. When the Meek Shall Inherit and All the Peacemakers be Blessed

The anger gets Bucky only as far as the bunker door before it fades. He’d moved across the country with the single-minded steadiness of a shark plowing through the dark water after blood. But there’s no frenzy when he reaches his goal, now that he’s standing in sight of it Bucky can no longer seem to feel anything at all. He’s ceased to be the shark and become a bit of flotsam, because that’s all he is without Steve. Its all he’s ever been. He’s still going to kill them all and sow the ground of this hated place with salt, but he can’t feel it. Steve’s death is the fucking ocean and every agent he kills is just a paper napkin to dry it with. 

On his way here he could avoid looking past the killing. It was something to focus on, to ignore how horribly afraid he is of what comes after. The fear is numbing, as it had been when he’d received his draft papers and he’d known he’d be torn away from Steve, as it had been every time they’d called the priest in to read Steve his last rites. Then, as now, he’d frozen to his core and felt nothing while he pleaded over and over for Steve to live because Bucky needed him. He needed him so badly. But he’s older now and he knows that what he needs makes no difference to how things are.

In the end he takes the base apart like a parent carefully packing away an unneeded toy. He’s meticulous, passionless and entirely thorough. The carbon monoxide neutralizes every man and woman in the building before they even register a threat, leaving Bucky free to find Steve’s archer friend and deposit him a safe distance from the building. He slips a transmitter into Clint’s hand. He isn’t hurt much and the Avengers would find him sooner or later, but this way at least it’ll be sooner. The man blinks at him, tries to grasp Bucky’s arm with clumsy fingers. Bucky can’t bear to be touched right now, and he’s afraid if he looks him in the eye Clint will see how badly Bucky wishes it was the other way around, how much he hates Clint for surviving. 

“Steef- nuh,” Clint’s slurring and Bucky peels himself away, turns back to the task at hand. In the end, the simplicity of killing all those people who kept him caged for so long only makes him hate himself more. Its his fault that Steve’s dead. If he’d had the courage to end this years ago- run from them when he’d first remembered himself or just fucking killed himself and died as Bucky Barnes- HYDRA wouldn’t have had their Asset. They wouldn’t have had the power and pull that they did, that delivered SHIELD into their hands; that delivered Steve into their hands.

********************

Steve wakes up in a four poster bed in a room with royal blue walls and lots of natural light. Its simultaneously different from waking up in SHIELD’s 1940s set and eerily similar. The man before him is a fake but his surroundings are real. Real furniture, not the impersonal kind found in hospitals or hotels, real lamps, real curtains. There’s real art on the walls, impressive art; all original comics art from the golden or silver age. The restraints are real too, HYDRA made adamantium body restraints across his forearms, calves and torso. The man leaning over him is fake though. He looks like Nick Fury, looks incredibly like Nick Fury. Enough of a resemblance there that Steve will believe whatever cloning, twins-separated-at-birth story the guy’ll choose to feed him- if he chooses to come clean. But there’s no military in this man’s posture, and something different, something worrying glinting in the man’s eyes and he most definitely has both of them.

“Easy, easy Captain. You’re only restrained because I couldn’t risk you lashing out in your sleep. You’re not a danger to me Captain Rogers, and I’m not a danger to you. My name is Elijah Price.” He sounds patient, even kind and that makes Steve even more uneasy, “But you must call me Mr. Glass.”

“Ok,” he whispers. His voice is thick with disuse.

“I’m a disciple of your Dr. Erskine, in spirit of course. Certainly not as brilliant as he was scientifically, but he and I have kindred philosophies.”

“Which are what exactly?”

“The greatest good for the greatest number. Erskine wrote in his journals that he picked you because your feebleness lent you a spiritual greatness. I believe his exact words were ‘a weak man knows the value of strength’. You were a weak man, Captain and look what you’ve become, all that you’ve accomplished. I too know what it means to be weak, and frailty is the root of all human suffering.”

Steve can’t quite process what the man’s saying, despite his calm, reasonable tone. “How did you get me away from HYDRA? What happened to Clint? And… Bucky. I saw him there- god, I have to go back, I have to find him.” He strains to sit up against the restraints.

“You’re not listening. It doesn't matter how I retrieved you from them, what matters is why. I’ve seen your file, Captain, before the serum. You were quite sickly, for your time. If I’d been born then I would most likely not have survived childhood. See-“ he leans closer over Steve and pulls down the skin under one eye, “Blue tinted sclera, just one side effect of my condition- OI type 1. Osteogenesis imperfecta. My body doesn’t produce enough collagen so my bones break like a young girl’s heart, but they heal so much more slowly than that.”

“That’s awful,”- maybe if he can keep this guy talking, get some intel or maybe even talk him around to letting Steve up..

“And you, fighting to keep up with your peers even as your lungs filled with fluid and your spine refused to hold you straight,” he touches Steve for the first time, laying one palm against Steve’s belly just below the chest restraint. Its an uncomfortably intimate touch and Steve’s always been ticklish there. The last thing he wants now is to laugh. “Such spirit we have, you and I, to have come so far with our own bodies fighting us the whole way. Until you met Erskine, of course. And for me, until I met you,” he smiles.

“What do you want from me?”

“I only want what you want Captain. We’re going to do great things together, as Dr. Erskine would have wanted, we are going to save the world.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, Mr. Glass. Smart enough to infiltrate Hydra and devious enough to use them for himself? Check. Deeply personal and insane reasons to fixate on Steve Rogers? Check.
> 
> I love Samuel L. Jackson in Unbreakable. As much as I've come to roll my eyes at M. Night Shyamalan, that movie holds up. He and Jackson have spoken occasionally about sequels although I'm doubtful that anything will come of it. But I've always wondered about what happened to Mr. Glass at the end, and he fit so naturally into the Marvelverse that I had to write him in.


	15. HYDRA Infringes on Copyright Belonging to The Jim Henson Company

Something was sitting on Clint’s head. That was the only explanation for it. Nothing could make his head _this_ heavy unless there was, like, a moose or something sitting on it. He groans, it like he's swallowed a mouthful of mothballs. 

"Take it easy," says a voice, "you're going to be okay." 

Clint convinces his eyelids to raise just a smidge and he can see Bruce standing beside him. “Shtak towa?,” he grates and damn he's doing the best Vito Corleone impression ever and he's not even able to enjoy it. 

“That’s right, you’re in New York,” he gives Clint a glass of water with a straw and helps him sip. It's the nicest present he’s ever gotten. “Can you tell me what's the last thing you remember?" Clint tries to think, he really does. But his head feels like an unsolved Rubik's cube, his thoughts won't line up right.  He twists at it trying to figure out which are the important things— "Steve- " 

The Other Guy looks out of Bruce’s eyes for a second, "We saw the video.”

“No!” It's coming back now, “ 'S a fake. Sum’mon- someone took him.” He tries to sound assured and decisive, and succeeds as much as anyone can with one of the top ten worst headaches in human history. “Bruce, get the others. They need to hear this.”

*********

He, Pepper, Bruce and Tony are already sitting around the conference table when Thor and Natasha return from examining the remains of the HYDRA lab. Clint takes a deep breath and blurts out, ”Steve's alive, I didn't hallucinate it. There was a man, he faked the tape and took Steve. It must have been that same morning, because he's the last person I saw before everything went dark."

It's a crazy story and he’s had crazy things done to him but these are _his people_ and they have to believe him. The others have been silent so far, unwilling to insinuate that he’s slightly non compos mentis but also unwilling to get their hopes up too much. He can tell they want to believe him but there’s too much he himself doesn’t remember or understand.

“I know,” Natasha says, tossing something in a plastic evidence bag down on the table.

“We found this device by the body of a man who did not die by the Soldier’s hand,” says Thor, taking a seat next to Bruce.

“It's a wound rig,” explains Natasha, “They use them in movies to fake bullet wounds. This one’s a little more sophisticated. They used silver fulminate to create the blast and probably imbedded it into Steve’s scalp to make it look more convincing.”

The group seems to take a collective sigh of relief— Steve’s not dead ( _yet_ , Clint’s brain unhelpfully reminds him), and Clint hasn’t cracked under the stress. They might still be able to salvage this.

“Well thank god we debunked that before Coulson found out,” Tony says, grinning for the first time since Clint’s woken up, “He’d have gone into cardiac arrest.”

“So what’s actually happening then?” asks Pepper, “Whoever took Steve, they— ”

“He,” interrupts Clint, “It was one guy. He had assistants but he took them out before he bailed.”

“One guy, is he taking Steve somewhere else for HYDRA? Someplace more secure?” she continues.

“No,” Natasha shakes her head, “HYDRA knew the Soldier was compromised after they caught me. They knew we’d be coming for Steve and Clint and that keeping them as hostages was their only bargaining chip. Faking Steve’s death was designed to provoke us, Barnes in particular, and it worked. As far as the rest of HYDRA knows, Steve’s dead, Barnes killed everyone left at the lab and is coming for them next. This was designed so no one would be looking for Steve."

“Great. Someone who’s too evil to work for HYDRA has gone AWOL with Captain America for reasons unknown. Nobody let Coulson find out,” says Tony, “He’ll never forgive us.”

“Who _is_ this guy? Clint, did you notice anything else about him? His voice? His face?” asks Bruce.

“He didn’t talk, and he was wearing a surgical mask but—“ Clint hesitates because this is the part he’s least sure of, the most surreal, dreamlike part of that whole nightmarish time. “From what I saw, and I didn’t get a good look at him, but he looked… kinda like Director Fury.”

“Nick Fury?”

“I’m not saying it was Nick Fury,” he continues hastily, “This guy had two eyes, and he had hair. But his eyes were the same. I spent an hour staring at Fury’s picture on the iPad before you got here and if you change those few things, they could be twins.”

"So what, an evil clone? Didn’t the Muppets just make that movie?” Tony asks with only a hint of snark.

“When you’ve eliminated the impossible whatever is remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” says Thor gravely. Five heads turn to stare at him. “Jane has given me some of your great Midgardian epics to read, many are quite enthralling.”

“Well, its obvious who we have to ask. Jarvis, get Colonel Fury for us.”


	16. An Appropriate Response to Reality

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warnings: forced drug use and some medical ickyness

“Did I dream it? Is Bucky really alive?”

Glass regards him curiously, “Which answer will hurt more?" Steve starts to reply but he’s cut off, “Nevermind. I’m not going to lie to you. Yes, he’s alive. But I’m afraid that’s all the information I have on him at the moment.”

“Are you a clone?,” Steve asks next, because its been dancing in the front of his mind and he desperately wants some kind of information to cling to. Even if the guy lies to him it will tell Steve something about the man. 

“Ha. Not in the way you mean,” Glass replies.

“Why do you look like Nick Fury?” As soon as the words leave his mouth the man’s eyes narrow. 

“Nick Fury is a fool. He comes from a family of fools. In 1949 his father and mother volunteered for a medical trial. Its hard to fathom, but they truly believed that they would be given free, cutting edge fertility treatment and there would be no strings attached. They knew they were part of an experimental trial but they never guessed just what kind of experiments were being run. And who have American doctors historically turned to when they need human lab rats?” he gives a dry, humorless laugh, “Nick Fury was the genetic lottery winner, the perfect son his parents came for and they left without knowing the rest of us would ever exist. They went off to live their peaceful lives and SHIELD let the rest of us grow and come into this world alone, and when they’d learned all they could they sent us out into the world without even a star to guide us.”

“SHIELD wouldn’t do that, Peggy wouldn’t do that,” Steve protests.

“Wouldn’t they? They experimented on you. Besides, SHIELD, HYDRA, what does it matter? An asp hiding in the shadow of a cobra.”

Steve swallows, dread building in his lungs like fluid, “What happened to the other, your brothers? Do you know where they are?”

“They’re all dead. We each had something wrong with us, you see. Only Fury was born whole. Now he and I are the last, and I imagine he’ll be dead before long.”

“You’re doing the very thing you despise," Steve's voice breaks despite himself, "This is just— it's eugenics in a bottle.”

“ _Wrong. False. Incorrect._ ” Glass sounds emotional for the first time, “I’m going to save humanity, make us what we were always meant to be. Humans have always said ‘the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak’. I am going to erase that phrase from our collective vocabulary.”  

Steve shakes his head, its the only part of his body he can move, except for his fingers and toes, “People will just find new ways to hurt each other, you’ll never be able to stop that.”

  Glass leans over him, his dark eyes gleaming, “I’m not trying to eradicate suffering, I’m just going to level the playing field. Imagine, equal strength, health, stamina in us all— women in Africa facing mass rape at the hands of countless enemy soldiers, but these women are more than a match for their aggressors. The police shoot an unarmed man, but he can withstand their bullets. His body can heal itself even as the wounds are inflicted. No one will be weaker or sicker than anyone else. We can turn our energies away from chasing immortality, fighting off sickness and injury. Think of what we can do with those energies— exploration, art, the pursuit of knowledge. We can stand naked at the summit of Mount Everest and as we descend we can clear away the trash we’ve left there. Centuries from now people will look back on this time as the moment civilization truly began.”

For a moment Steve is overwhelmed by the scope of the man’s delusion. When he speaks his voice is hoarse, “There are _so_ many things wrong with that plan.”

“Well, if you can’t see your moral duty here, I’ll have to resort to other means.” Glass steps back and drags over a small wheeled tray covered with a white cloth.

“It's not that simple, it never was,” he tries to sound calm, persuasive, “Even if it worked the way you want it to, you’re describing a world where everyone has each other by the throat.”

“You’re nearly recovered. HYDRA’s been cutting into your forebrain. Do you know how many times they did that? Five. In total they removed 348 grams of brain tissue, that’s about the size of the average human brain and you _grew it back_. You’re alive, conscious, and coherent. I’ll have to conduct some tests to determine if its affected your cognitive abilites, but frankly, you should be a vegetable. The fact that you want to hoard that miracle for yourself... I honestly expected better from Captain America. But oh well,” he lifts the cloth and Steve can see syringes, tubing, a saline bag on the tray along with some things he can’t name.

When he injects Steve, Glass’ voice is soft as a caress, “I’ve been waiting a long time for you.”

**************************

He doesn’t hurt Steve, not once. It's much, much worse than that. He makes Steve feel fucking amazing. Intoxicants haven’t worked on him in years and before that he never tried any sort of hard drug- he was always too poor and too busy for anything like that to appeal to him. The first time Glass injects him, he’s braced for some sort of physical pain or nightmare hallucinations. Instead, he smiles; it's like every orgasm and every exhausted collapse onto something soft, it's being floated up to heaven like his mama told him happened when you die. He thinks he might be dying the first time because he’s okay with this, with all of it, as long as he feels _this goddam good_. It lasts about twenty minutes.

When he’s himself again he can see that he’s been catheterized, his bandages have been changed and he’s hooked up to the saline. Glass is sitting at a table in a lab coat, his cane leaning against his chair, marking a row of vials filled with, presumably, Steve’s blood. He turns and glances at Steve over his glasses.

“Twenty-two minutes and forty-five seconds. You do metabolize quickly. Most people last hours on that size dose.”

“What was that?” Steve gasps, really afraid for the first time in a long time. Pain wouldn’t frighten him, but _this_ , feeling so goddam good terrifies him.

“Desomorphine. I’m afraid my restraints might not be quite up to the task of containing you for as long as I need. I am just one man with limited resources, and no match for you physically. So I thought I’d find a pleasant way to occupy your time while we complete our work together.”

“Don’t do it again.” Steve isn’t sure if he’s threatening or pleading.

“You don’t like it?” asks Glass innocently, “Most people love it. They love it so much they take it until their bodies literally start to rot. But don’t worry, that can’t happen to you.” He fills another syringe and advances on Steve. Steve thrashes against the restraints but Glass was right— he’d need more time to make any headway against them, and when the needle punctures his arm that happy, golden feeling overtakes him again and he can’t bring himself to struggle against anything.

He tries to count the injections but soon loses track. Four? It can’t be more than four or maybe five. The veins in his forearm where he’s being injected darken, a black spiderweb under his no-longer tan skin. When the whole spot finally turns putrid, red infected flesh ringed with black dead flesh, Glass moves to the other arm. “We’ll give that side a chance to heal, I think,” he smiles, “Don’t worry Captain Rogers, we’re making remarkable progress.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first IVF occurred in 1944. In 1949 Pope Pius condemned any fertilization of human eggs outside the body, declaring that those who do so "take the Lord's work into their own hands." Despite Catholic Church resistance, the number of infertility clinics in the United States soared. In 1954 an Illinois court ruled that babies conceived through artificial insemination by donor (AID) were legally illegitimate. Most other states rejected this conclusion. By 1960 some 50,000 babies had been born as a result of AID.
> 
> Desomorphine is a derivative of morphine with powerful, fast-acting opioid effects, dose-by-dose it is eight to ten times more potent than morphine. The drug can be made from codeine and iodine derived from OTC medications and red phosphorus from match strikers in a process similar to the manufacture of methamphetamine from pseudoephedrine. The street name in Russia for homemade desomorphine is krokodil (Russian: крокодил, crocodile), possibly related to the tendency of a user's kin, damaged by the drug use, to flake off and resemble crocodile leather. *DO NOT google it if you do not want to see really gross pictures.*


	17. Roots Running Deep Into Each Man's Private and Long-Standing Karma

Jarvis locates Bucky in a remote town in Maine where HYRDA apparently had a training base disguised as a small, private, liberal arts college. Surveillance footage downloaded to Avengers Tower shows Barnes storming the building, slaying the trainers and administrators without mercy or hesitation. He’s different with the recruits. Most are young, ex-military by their bearing, early to mid-twenties, and Barnes stares at them like they’re an alien race, one that shouldn’t exist on this planet. The ones who attack him are killed, but it’s an almost lackluster fight on his end, the Asset swinging his arm like he’s in nothing more important than a tennis match.

None of the trainees have been there long enough to know better than to engage the Winter Soldier without multiple contingency plans and back-up teams. A few might have arrived at the facility with the intelligence and sense of self-preservation to run after seeing the Asset kill eighty percent of their ranks without breaking a sweat, but HYDRA teaches obedience first, common sense seventh or eight. Some mixture of pride, training, loyalty and arrogance won’t let them turn tail. Afterward, when the only living souls left are the literal lab rats in the center’s R&D wing, Barnes stretches himself out on the hard tile floor amidst the bodies and shuts his eyes.

He’s still like that when Tony arrives seven hours later. He lands with enough noise to announce his presence, but not to startle Barnes and raises his viser.

“Cap’s alive,” is the first thing out of his mouth. It was supposed to be placating, the magic words to soothe Barnes. In fact, Bucky tackles Tony, tearing into the suit with his metal arm. 

“Shut up!” he cries, “I don’t want anymore goddamn lies, do you hear me?” 

Tony can feel the metal crinkle around his neck, for the moment just grazing his throat. He doesn’t fight back, merely holds his hands up in plain sight. “Barton saw him smuggled out before you got there. The video was a set-up.”

Barnes is grinding his teeth and digging his fingers into the armor. The noise it makes could kill brain cells. Tony continues, “We think there’s something going on within HYDRA—a coup or something. The guy who took Steve looked just like Colonel Fury,” he studies Bucky, “He’s the head of SHIELD—“

“I know who Nick Fury is,” bites Bucky.

“Okay, well this guy looked just like him, except he had both his eyes.”

Tony pushes himself up onto his elbows gradually. Barnes releases his grip on the suit and sits back on his heels. His eyes and breathing are still agitated and unsettled, like a wary dog. Tony keeps his voice low and even, “We were hoping you could tell us who he is. Do you know him?”

Bucky shakes his head, “Not by name. I’ve only seen him in passing, but never worked with him directly. I always assumed he was a ringer for Fury.”

“Will you help us find him? If any of us are going to rescue Steve we’re better off together, and I’m saying this as someone who hates group projects.”

The rest of it goes about as smoothly as coaxing a feral cat. Barnes accompanies Tony back to New York to plan their next move in silence. If before the video he’d been a downed power line, now he’s a nest of frayed wires— dancing off in all directions and each one enough to kill you. When they walk into the conference room to meet the others, newly joined by Fury, the air buzzes with tension and mistrust. Fury and Barnes regard each other warily, and with poorly concealed disdain on Bucky’s side.

“Shall we begin?” asks Natasha, “Colonel Fury’s brought all the family records he could find from the time when we believe the alternate was… created. There’s a lot to get through so it’d be best if—

Bucky interrupts her, “Did you know about me?” The cool blankness is gone and he’s trembling. He stares at Fury. “You recruited Natasha, did you know who I was? What they were making me do?”

“Yasha,” Nat begins in a soothing voice.

“It’s alright,” Fury’s voice is level, “SHIELD knew about the Winter Soldier, I knew about the Winter Soldier. We did not know about Sergeant James Barnes of the Howling Commandos.”

“And if you had known?” Bucky’s voice wavers, “Would it have made any difference or would you have just tried to terminate me like any HYDRA operative?”

“Excuse me if I point out that this is hardly the time for pointless speculation,” Fury barks, “I was under the impression that you were somewhat eager to recover Captain Rogers before any further damage is done.”

Bucky’s standing now, leaning forward as though ready to crawl across the table to Fury. On either side of him, Thor shifts slightly nearer and Bruce inches back. “What do you know about damage?” spits Bucky.

“Oh, I know plenty about the damage you’ve done. I’ve lost good agents to you. How long have you known what you were doing each time they sent you out? Agent Romanov can attest to the damage you can do, as can Mr. Stark.”

Tony toys with one of his magnetic wrist bands and won’t meet anyones eye. Natasha mouths at Fury, “Not now.”

Fury continues, “You could have come to us, we could have protected you.”

The answering laugh from Bucky is chilling, “SHIELD couldn’t protect their balls with both hands. And then what would you do with me? Try me as a war criminal or keep me as a lab rat?”

“Some might say either of those options were better than staying where you were.”

Bucky is snake-strike fast in his grab for Fury, but he’d been telegraphing his intent throughout their argument. Thor and Natasha are ready for him. Thor catches him in a bear hug as he dives across the table while Nat seizes Fury and drags him out of the way. Bucky claws at Thor with his metal hand, batters at the blonde head with his forearm.

“Come away,” Thor says, calm but firm. He hauls Bucky out of the room.

Natasha moves to follow them but Bucky snarls at her, “I tried to save you! You were one good thing I did. You’re too smart not to have guessed. Did you forget me or did you just not care? We’re all in it— Steve was the only one who was good.” His voice breaks, “How? How could we let this happen?”


End file.
